Final Fantasy II: A Retrospective

Continued from Page 1

The best attempt at an emotional payoff, however, comes not from death, but from a re-emergence. Late on, the team is amazed to discover that their former comrade Leon is very much still alive and, unbeknownst to them, has been working against them the entire time as the emperor’s mysterious Dark Knight. The friend-turned-enemy is a well-worn trope in storytelling, sure, but the clues for it are sown pretty well here, drip-feeding suspicion without leaving the reveal feeling like a pointless endeavour.

The thing is, even after the reveal, Final Fantasy II subverts expectation brilliantly. I mean, it would have been all too easy to resort to cliché and have the group, most pertinently Maria, talk her brother back from the dark side before beating the boss together and then living happily ever after, but while he is welcomed back into the fold, the events are far from a fairy tale.

After Mateus is seemingly dispatched, Leon announces his survival by installing himself as the new and equally malevolent emperor, but his reign is short-lived. In fact, it never really starts... Mateus makes a dramatic return from the depths of Hell, more powerful than ever, and easily reclaims his throne. It’s only when Leon has no other option that he agrees to fight alongside his friends once more, and only to take down his former master.

And even when the real battle is eventually won, Leon is still so twisted by hate that he refuses to accept the happy ending; too much has happened between him and the others to slip back into their old lives and he leaves on a self-imposed exile, despite Firion leaving the door open for reconciliation.

While its age means that the dialogue lacks the nuance to really give this scene the punch it deserves, I still love the grit of it. Brilliant and bittersweet. Bravo, Square, bravo.

One criticism I’ve always levelled at JRPGs as a genre, is that story and gameplay are often completely separate entities, however, Final Fantasy II does have a half-hearted crack at providing players with more agency in story beats with its 'Key Terms' system. Throughout, you have the opportunity to learn a number of key phrases, the first being 'Wild Rose', which when repeated to the right people will open up new dialogue. While the effort made to make me something other than a passive observer is definitely appreciated, the system feels way undercooked, amounting only to committing red words to the game’s memory bank and then endlessly using each on talkative NPCs until you get something worthwhile. It’s no surprise, then, that this was dumped and occasionally bettered in subsequent entries.

For all Final Fantasy II does get right in terms of storytelling, it’s the combat mechanics where Square took the biggest risks. Final Fantasy II has its negative reputation for this exact reason, and it’s easy to see why: Gone are character and party levels, and in their place is, well… self-directed repetition; rather than levelling stats, you're levelling individual attributes.

This means that if you want to get better at something, you need to do a lot of it. Want Firion to improve his swordplay? Hit more enemies with swords. Want your healer to restore more HP? Heal lots. Want better defensive stats? Well, then you’d better be prepared to allow your team to take a lot of knocks.

It’s really not a far cry away from systems found in modern RPGs, such as Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but my first impression here was that it didn’t quite meld well with turn-based combat.

Playing in this way off the back of an already grind-heavy predecessor, and having the manipulable stats broken down to this minute degree made the levelling process seem like it would be a huge, impenetrable wall. In fact, there are so many attributes that you can and need to level up independently that I actually nearly gave up in the first few hours when improving them to any significant degree seemed painfully slow going. Still, committed to finishing it, I resolved to persevere and, thanks to some quick research on the interwebs, I discovered a way to make the system work more efficiently.

Chiefly, I made my party fight amongst themselves.

Basically, Final Fantasy II doesn't care whether you're being hit by fiend or friend, so by having my melee characters beat on their teammates while my main magic users cast offensive and defensive spells on everyone, I was able to boost my party in the most pressing stats swiftly and easily. I didn't do this in all fights, of course, but as a tactic, it definitely provided a valuable advantage in getting ahead of the difficulty curve and helped me tool my team for whatever specific threats the immediate region might try to hit me with.

On face value, of course, it’s pretty dumb to need to spend a solid chunk of playtime having your team squabbling against each other instead of taking on the enemies, but, I have to admit, it added an extra layer of in-fight management that I found lacking in the original and, at a stretch, I could justify it by reasoning that they were simply sparring and training together.

(This workaround, by the way, is apparently a watered-down version of a development oversight in the original release, where those keen of eye realised that stat boosts were permanently applied when selecting an attack, not committing to it, meaning you could repeatedly cancel all your party’s selected moves and still keep the stat increases for each. Very cheeky…)

This levelling shortcut also opened my eyes to just how big the scope was for party customisation: No one in your party is stuck in a specific class; they can use any weapon or spell providing you put the time into training them. In the beginning I had still habitually fallen into the trap of setting my team up with a dedicated warrior, healer and black mage configuration, but when I realised that my main damage dealers could also learn healing spells and buffs and vice-versa, it felt amazingly freeing, and completely transformed the way I prepared for battles.

After a few hours of believing this to be the worst levelling system ever conceived, it had suddenly clicked with me in a way it doesn’t seem to for others. I ended up positively hooked on the rhythm of it, spending many nights not even progressing the story at all, only expanding my party's range of skills. I even got to the point where I’d accidentally made the latter half of the adventure way too easy. Hey, I was having fun, that's all that matters, and that’s what I will take away from this experience.

So, this turned out to be a bit of a weird one for me. With so much negativity surrounding its formula, I had originally entered into Final Fantasy II expecting to like it much less than the original, but I ended up liking it a whole lot more. Don’t get me wrong, there are definite missteps; levelling shouldn’t require a thematically weak workaround to not be painful, and the opening few hours were definitely a struggle until I figured out how to abuse systems in ways that suited me.

Once I’d cleared that hurdle and formed that understanding, however, Final Fantasy II’s true scope was revealed, and I was able to enjoy most of what it had to offer. At the centre of it all was a solid plot that made more effort to make me care about its characters than its predecessor, and kept me invested by occasionally letting loose from its thematic chains of Good vs. Evil, and deviating enough from popular clichés to surprise.

While Final Fantasy II may never top my ‘Favourite Final Fantasy’ list, ultimately, I'm glad I stuck with it; there's a lot more value to be found in this risky sequel than most seem to give credit.

Andy Corrigan is a freelance games journalist based in Australia. He's intending on playing through every Final Fantasy game and you can read about the original game here. Tweet at him here.